There is a less fun genre that only makes itself known to me when I have completely stopped enjoying the game in any time-honored sense, lurking beneath the surface like a stupid icon on a losing scratch card. Instead of something better, I’ll call it “systemic tourism.” It’s not as satisfying virtual tourism as you can do in something like Yakuza’s Kamurocho, where you sip deep-fried whiskey, entranced by the lights. It’s more like searching Google Street View through the canals of Venice to see if you can spot someone leaking from the side of a gondola – looking for anarchic anomalies because, honestly, the views just don’t impress us.
At the risk of sounding like some terrible mathematician-glee: My experience with the open-world zombie survival game Dread Dawn included exactly two and a half separate instances of fun, and an additional appreciation for some really good bits of the setting, which I’ll get to soon. With a significant overhaul of virtually every player interaction Dread Dawn offers – from excruciatingly tedious looting to rusty combat – you might one day find it worth your time. He has incredible ambition, although he is surrounded by darkness and garbage, like a dictatorial rat in a toilet bowl. However, in most cases I can only warn you in advance to avoid this.
I’m actually a huge fan of advance warnings these days, after the fighter planes that occasionally decided to bomb the streets I was running through didn’t get any, and promptly burned me to death…
Everything started very promising. I’m hiding in a school filled with other survivors of the garden-variety zombocalypse, and the sight of an isometric camera panning through the halls – full of sleeping bags and makeshift fires – feels urgent, almost desperate. What’s truly amazing here is the soundscape: a disordered, soiled mélange that transcends pure audio design to deliver something that I imagine is pretty close to how your terrified ears would actually translate a low performance of this size. It’s all alarms and panicked chatter, crackling flames and dogs approaching in the distance. Sometimes you can hear sobbing and screaming – individual and collective suffering. It sounds like hell and it’s definitely Dread Dawn’s best feature.
My first task is to check on my character’s sister in the girls’ dorm. Along the way, I bump into one of several balls scattered around the area and accidentally throw it at the guy lying on the sleeping bag, who then jumps up and follows me for about a minute, knocking me to the floor every time I get up. I’m not sure if it was a quirk or a sly guide on how to harass other survivors, but the game is full of tips on this kind of systemic mess (free of charge). There’s never really a lot of them, but sometimes they come to the surface, threatening an compelling scenario before falling into nothingness.
On the way to my dorm, I’ll raid a few bookshelves. Looting is such a monkey’s paw here. The things you find are intriguing, but getting them is a real pain. The result is one of Dread Dawn’s worst features, which appears alongside an otherwise compelling time, like a marauding fart on a bus dropping by your side as your book gets better and better. Positioning is where the game most closely resembles something like Dead Rising, allowing you to load up mostly useless but inspiring trinkets to play as a guy who collects balls, rocks, and pots full of stationary objects to throw at zombies throughout the game having a fully functional weapon. At some point you get a skateboard. This lasts about five minutes until you realize that the streets are too crowded to avoid running into zombies and then sampling the sidewalk every few minutes, but hey, at least I smiled. I’ll take whatever I can get.
There’s just too much stuff, though, and looting both containers and corpses takes a slow-cooked eternity. Trying to hunt down individual corpses from a dead horde is a nightmare, and the containers put a low loading bar on you before you step inside. Inventory space is restricted, so “loot everything” will soon become useless, which means you’ll spend a lot of time dragging items around. But the worst part is the inevitable FOMO. Dread Dawn’s economy is weird, with $800 cooked chickens and $200 weapons, so you end up wanting to stuff everything in your pocket in case you need it later, but it slows things down. I ended up feeling a twinge of anxiety for every zombie I didn’t loot. Sometimes that meant about 80 anxiety attacks. That’s at least two signals anxiety! It hangs over you, prompting exploration that mostly inspires pathetic guesswork.
Anyway, some weirdly translated dialogue later and I’m in the open world, following the red arrows to find my sister (you get main and side quests, and sometimes you’ll have to stop what you’re doing to run back to the school and fend off a wave of zombies , using the built defense). To cross one street I have to pass about fifty zombies. The hordes in Dread Dawn are huge, although they are uncomplicated to avoid due to their tendency to follow one leader and gather behind you once you have their attention. The thing is, the game doesn’t actually tell you this, so I spend more time than I’d like to admit looking around for an alternative solution. At this point I’m armed with a screwdriver. Shortly after, I find a gun and learn that it is less useful in terms of stopping power and damage than a screwdriver. If this suggests that the screwdriver – or any other melee weapon – is fun to operate, it’s not. You have a quick jab that zombies barely flinch from, or a powerful, hefty jab that gets the job done but feels awkward and limp.
I’ll jump to conclusions by saying this: when you realize that the writing in Dread Dawn isn’t compelling, the crafting and tower defense elements are routine, and the exploration is painful, all that remains is the appeal of killing lots of zombies: Name me ten games about zombies, and I’ll show you ten better ways to spend your time killing zombies.
However, strangely enough, I would be hard-pressed to show you ten better water snakes. I… I don’t know what happened here, really. It’s not like you encounter these snakes very often. As you’d expect, they’re conveniently placed near the fires. They’re also just weirdly better than anything else in the game, snaking around obstacles and squirming as you carry them. You can control the intensity of the blast, and extinguishing the flames is simply satisfying. This should be the game, Dread Dawn! Just call the water “zombie-killing juice” and give your character a full backpack and a enduring snake weapon. That would be good!
Unfortunately, the carpet bomb fires I mentioned above cannot be extinguished. From time to time you will have to deal with fights between the army and hordes of zombies. You’ll get through it, maybe jump behind the turret for a while, go out towards the target and then bammo! Bombs out of nowhere. The initial bombs don’t hurt, they just knock and stun. Emerging flames do this. Autosave is quite generous and thank you zombie Shakespeare. Stupid deaths included zombies being right above me when I entered a up-to-date area, and certain spots on the way to a critical objective suddenly becoming filled with enemy gun turrets without warning, and being right next door to an area full of genial turrets. There are right ways to make the world seem unsafe, but this isn’t it.
So, a few caveats to the summary. I didn’t come close to finishing Dread Dawn. I reached the point where the only way forward was to run back and forth for fifteen minutes, luring the massive horde twelve at a time to the machine gun site. At about this point, the game seemed physically painful to me, so I stopped. I feel much better now. Thank you for asking.
Secondly, I’m not a fan of collecting wood and stones at the best of times. After cutting down the first tree, I wrote down, “I’d rather be waterboarded with a cloth made of woven pig nipple hair and a bucket of rat disease.” That’s not actually what I meant, but the chopping is lackluster and very protracted. This is such a key interaction that Dread Dawn couldn’t handle it. If you’re a die-hard survival eater and have been waiting a while for updates, you might find some fun here because the framework has those minuscule sparks of fun ingenuity I mentioned. Otherwise, uh: the game is feeble. Don’t buy this!
